Let me remind you, moreover, of what cannot too often be pointed out, that the rigorous application of the legal tests of obscenity would prohibit the circulation of a very considerable part of the great literature of the world. The Bible, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Plato, Horace, Catullus, to take names at random, would all come under the ban. It is worth while pointing out that those most concerned with the suppression of “obscene” books are religious people. On their tests of obscenity the Bible certainly could not hope to escape; yet they believe, in general, that the Bible is the inspired word of God, a position which, I venture to suggest, should at the least give them pause. I do not know, indeed, how we are to create a healthy social attitude to the problems of sex, if all that deals with it from a new point of view, and with a frankness that admits the experimental nature of our contemporary solutions, is to be dismissed as “obscene”. Questions like those of birth control, extra-marital love, companionate marriage, sexual perversion, cannot really be faced in a scientific fashion by applying to them the standards of a nomadic Eastern people which drew up its rules more than two thousand years ago. Virtuous people who shrink from frank discussion in this realm seem to me responsible for probably more gratuitous suffering than any other group of human beings. The thing they call “innocence” I believe to be quite wanton ignorance, and, by its abridgment of freedom, it imprisons human personality in a fashion that is quite unpardonable. The same seems to me to be the case in the realm that is called blasphemy. I have no sort of sympathy with that attitude of mind which finds satisfaction in wanton insult to the religious convictions of others. But I am not prepared for its suppression. For I note that, historically, there are no limits to the ideas which religious persons will denounce as blasphemous; and, especially, that in an age of comparative religious indifference, the hand of persecution almost invariably chooses to fall only on humble men.[28] It attacks Mr G. W. Foote, but it leaves Lord Morley free to do infinitely more damage than any for which Mr Foote can ever have been responsible. I cannot, moreover, forget that what is blasphemy in Tennessee is common sense in New York, that the works of Wollaston and Toland and Chubb, which seemed entirely blasphemous to their generation, seem commonplace to ourselves. Every religious body really means by blasphemy an attack upon its fundamental principles. Such attacks are, of course, necessarily circulated to bring them into contempt. We who read Paine’s _Age of Reason_ with admiration for its cogency of argument, its trenchant style, its fearless appetite for truth, can hardly avoid a sense of dismay when we remember the days when it was secretly passed from hand to hand as an outrageous production, the possession of which was itself an indication of social indecency.